Comments for PostgreSQL

%I was slated
> to replace a MySQL backend with Oracle
> on Linux this evening
>

LOL - well all I can say there is &quot;may the force be with you&quot; I've been fighting with Oracle (9i)'s installer for a week now - it took me an hour just to get the installer to run, you have to go and do half the changes yourself - (these guys never heard of an install script??). At least I didn't have to go and fetch/try the entire contents of Blackdown's ftp server this time just to find a JRE it would run on - there's progress. And then the installer just fails with no given reason/error at multiple stages throughout the install. This shoddiness amazes me! When you consider that big projects like Apache, MySQL, PHP and the like have installed without a hitch on every Linux based OS I have thown them at (some old, some new, various distro's), it is incredible that an organisation such as Oracle can't get their installation processes sorted. The amount of fixing I've had to do just to get the installer to run does not bode well for the reliability of the products it installs!

I'd decided to try this and give Oracle a another chance after the disaster-on-a-CD that was OAS but it looks like their products are just as over complicated and half baked as ever. If it won't play ball in a few more days, I'll have to cross that off the list of things we might use in future projects.

Re: Performance issues
We are now using PostgreSQL 7.1.2 on a dual PIII/1gHz server with 1gb RAM for the past month.
The performance is much improved (both reads and writes) over 7.0.x. Coupled with pgAdmin, this database has some serious capabilities.

>
>
>
> To all who may concern:
>
> I am afraid to tell you that the
> POSTGRESQL is not as FREE as you
> think.
>
> The FTP server for postgreesql
> (ftp://ftp.postgresql.org) no longer
> permits non-member to log-on.
>
> I am sadden by this turn of event.

Re: Performance issues
We have been using PostgreSQL 7.0.3 on a quad XEON server
with 1gb RAM for about 5-months now. While the ODBC/SQL
is excellent as far as setup and compatibility, the performance
is not. I would still recommend it for any serious database
application that cannot afford commercial licensing.

Performance issues
I was playing around with 7.0 on my laptop the other day (P-90, w/ 40 megs RAM and rh6.0) and I was not very impressed with the speed factor of it. I have been using MySQL for close to a year now, I need something less restrictive. ( as far as the license )

Postgre has many features that the dbs don't have, for example, sub querys. But, MySQL is much much quicker. I plan on doing some testing on a AMD-500 dedicated server soon, I am hoping that the performance with PHP will be better.

Besides that, I think its a great db, but, needs more work. For general toying around and small to medium sites. Postgre is great. But, for big high trafic sites. I would not recommend it.

PGSQL 7.0
The big change is the addition of foreign keys and the increase in performance vs. the 6.x series. Around 6.5 the database server stopped leaking memory and trudging through queries hideously slowly. In the 7.x series it is poised to achieve feature parity with Oracle as far as SQL DDL and DML is concerned; the multiversion concurrency model from Oracle was adapted for use in Postgresql's internals around 6.5 as well, with decidedly positive results. 7.1 is slated to have outer joins, at which point it might be reasonable to start porting lower-traffic or smaller sites from Oracle to Postgresql in some cases. Certainly it will make life easier for developers who do not want to grapple with Oracle or MySQL's shortcomings simply to use a good SQL92 back-end.

PGSQL is a high quality opensource RDBMS which is quickly closing in on MySQL's application support, and blows that RDBMS out of the water as far as robustness is concerned. I was slated to replace a MySQL backend with Oracle on Linux this evening -- while MySQL is very fast, it has not proven to be robust enough for an active multimedia website's framework. We don't use Postgresql in-house at my day job, but I have consulted with other companies that were very pleased with it for their backend. In any event, the swap-out was rescheduled for tomorrow night, so I am tweaking Postgresql 7.0beta5 for my own website instead.

Postgresql is really the only opensource database with an active enough developer base and a rich enough set of features to touch high-end commercial RDBMS offerings. The big changes for the 7.x series of releases are almost all related to narrowing the remaining gap, and offering a Free alternative to Oracle and its ilk (Sybase, DB2, Informix).